Sunday, September 02, 2018

Village Whispers: What Hollywood Could Learn From Success Of “Crazy Rich Asians”


Rare pearl discovery


Natural pearls only form in one out of every 5,000–10,000 Pinctada Maxima pearl oyster shells, a pearl farmer says.


The Village Voice, founded in 1955, ceases publication. A look back at how it changed journalism.
 The New Yorker


New Crowdfunded Press Publishes Quick-Turnaround Books By Journalists On Current Affairs

Byline Media, a London-based crowdfunded platform for independent journalism, has launched a book-publishing arm. Byline Books' first release, A Virtue of Disobedience by Asim Qureshi, "was typeset, proofed, and printed within five weeks of the fundraising effort's end date, April 25." Journalist Mark Piesing talks to Qureishi and to Byline Media co-director Stephen Colegrave about the venture. … [Read More


'A convicted terrorist and a convicted spy' walk into the Opera House... and get a standing ovation

Despite a last-minute announcement that she would not be appearing in person after her Australian visa wasn't approved, hundreds of people have turned up to hear Chelsea Manning speak via satellite.








George Clooney Tops Forbes’s Annual List Of Best-Paid Actors With $239 Million

Granted, most of this is not for movie roles at all, or even endorsements: it comes from the purchase by a conglomerate of a tequila business Clooney co-founded five years ago. (Forbes‘s list includes income from endorsements and other “extracurricular” activities.) At no. 2 with $124 million is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who racked up the highest-ever income to come strictly from acting. (Unfortunately and predictably, the best-paid actress of the year earned much, much less.)









What Dancers Can Sense From The Audience


There’s a dynamic relationship between live performers and the audience. Just as dancers, actors and musicians amuse, provoke or otherwise move their public, the public moves them. Muttering in the seats can be heard onstage. So can the odd argument and ringtones. The sounds and behaviors of spectators can affect dancers’ psychology and even performance quality. They’re energized by cheers, of course, and demoralized when they’re expecting applause or laughter and there’s only silence. But they pick up on far more.






What Hollywood Could Learn From Success Of “Crazy Rich Asians”


Studios today gravitate more toward sequels and established franchises because they tend to be safer box-office bets. But audiences aren’t nearly as narrow-minded as the Hollywood development process might suggest. Time and again, films that appeal to a broader demographic range, or that belong to under-sung genres, sell many more tickets than predicted. Which is to say that multiple times every year, a film like Girls Trip, or Black Panther, or Crazy Rich Asians is dubbed a “surprise” success. But moving forward, industry experts—whether studios or box-office analysts—will have fewer reasons to be caught off guard. … Read More


Feeling Oppressed By Information Overload? There Are Historical Parallels


In the coming years, it may be that conversational, artificially intelligent assistants will become part of the answer, deciding whether or not to alert us to messages, helping us retrieve information and recommending items of interest. But figuring out book reviews, indexes and the rest took several centuries, so we shouldn’t expect an immediate solution. In the meantime we must endure information overload: the feeling that arises in the space of time between a sudden increase in the flow of information and the development of the tools to enable us to cope with it. …Read More



The best free movies on YouTube Digital Trends: “Google quietly began rolling out the youtube.com/movies section in 2011. Since then, its library of titles for rent, purchase, or streaming has grown considerably, adding up to more movies than you could watch in a lifetime. If you don’t want to pay for a streaming service like Netflix or HBO, you can view some free movies on YouTube, but it’s tough to find stuff that isn’t illegally uploaded or in poor quality. Many of the movies that are available are documentaries, campy horror flicks, and older titles from Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” and it’s not easy to make an educated choice when you’re faced with choosing something you’ve probably never heard of. So, to help save you some time in your search, we’ve sifted through the site to bring you this list of the best full-length — and, of course, free — movies on YouTube….”

·        Note – “Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis, helped pioneer the sci-fi genre as a whole. The dystopian film revolves around a man of wealth (Gustav Fröhlich), who abandons his privileged life to join a band of oppressed workers in a revolt. The film was initially praised for its technical merits (though not so much for its plot or commentary on society as a whole), and as time has gone on, its legacy has grown, as it’s now considered one of the defining films of the entire 20th century.”